on a high note
Hylton on the Hill Where the Music Plays On By Carla Christiano
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carpet of grass stretches between two parking lots, up a slight hill — a natural amphitheater of sorts. Red and yellow circles marked on the grass denote accessible or reserved seating and general seating, ensuring COVID-19 social distancing. Within each circle, concert goers sit on collapsible canvas chairs brought from home, munch homemade snacks or Thai food from Mum-Mum, the concert vendor, while listening to the band on the stage up front. An occasional plane flies overhead enroute to Manassas Airport a few miles away. Welcome to Hylton on the Hill.
Discovering Hylton on the Hill Started in early fall of 2020, Hylton on the Hill offers outdoor concerts from a range of artists — Celtic to blues, Mexilachian (a combination of Mexican and Appalachian music) to bluegrass and pop. Located behind the Hylton Performing Arts Center at the Manassas campus of George Mason University, Hylton on the Hill performances take place on a once unused open lot that is slated to become a road someday. “Hylton on the Hill is an informal, fun, social concert venue that we discovered not accidentally, but improvisationally, at
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September 2021 prince william living
the height of the pandemic when we just couldn’t face not being together and not presenting artists,” said Rick Davis, Dean of George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and Executive Director of the Hylton Center. After several months of cancelled performances due to the pandemic-caused lockdown, Davis and staff didn’t know when they would be back having live, in-the-theater performances. Yet, they wanted to do something. In their discussions, they had two objectives: “bringing people together for the sake of the community, for the sake of the audience, but also to keep the artistic community functioning. All these artists when the world closed down in March and April [2020] lost income, lost opportunity. We wanted to do whatever we could do to be part of their sustainability,” said Davis. One solution was right outside their door.
Continuing a Good Thing The idea of having outdoor concerts is not new to the Hylton Center. They have hosted Arts Alive, a day-long celebration of the arts for 10 years, as well as other festivals and an occasional
